Anti-psychiatry

Anti-psychiatry is the view that psychiatric treatments are often more damaging than helpful to patients, and a movement opposing such treatments for almost two centuries. It considers psychiatry a coercive instrument of oppression due to an unequal power relationship between doctor and patient, and a highly subjective diagnostic process.

Anti-psychiatry originates in an objection to what some view as dangerous treatments. Examples include electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock therapy, and brain lobotomy. An immediate concern is the significant increase in prescribing psychiatric drugs for children. There were also concerns about mental health institutions. All modern societies permit involuntary treatment or involuntary commitment of mental patients.

In the 1960s, there were many challenges to psychoanalysis and mainstream psychiatry, where the very basis of psychiatric practice was characterized as repressive and controlling. Psychiatrists involved in this challenge included Jacques Lacan, Thomas Szasz, Giorgio Antonucci, R. D. Laing, Franco Basaglia, Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti, and David Cooper. Others involved were Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman. Cooper coined the term "anti-psychiatry" in 1967, and wrote the book Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry in 1971. Thomas Szasz introduced the definition of mental illness as a myth in the book The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), Giorgio Antonucci introduced the definition of psychiatry as a prejudice in the book I pregiudizi e la conoscenza critica alla psichiatria (1986).

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